


His Child

by farrah_yondale



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 11:43:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6050323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farrah_yondale/pseuds/farrah_yondale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The demons tell him she must die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Child

Black thread trails against ivory marble floor. It folds and wavers like a curtain swollen by the breeze, brushing the earth with only a caress and no more.

Behind it, follows a scimitar.

It is blood-caked, made of the finest steel and has never betrayed its master who grips it firmly with hard leather fingers.  

Cherry red plops behind the weapon. It belongs to the mother of this castle who crafted a spiritual maze so that he might lose himself in his own mind. But this line of red is all that is left of her.

Flesh drags against scarlet branches. It belongs to the father of this castle, unsheathing a steady blade, strong, but not as loyal as his enemy’s. This fragment of skin and tissue is all that remains.

A fragrance beckons him forward, as if this scent wishes to be put out of its misery. He follows, an unwilling servant tugged along by chain-link iron.

The bedroom is pristine, sterile. The floor shines with sunlight, oblivious to the destruction this intruder might cause against its clean tile.

A cradle rocks gently at the foot of the master bed.

An infant coos, extending chubby fingers out for her maid, perhaps. But she is dead, too, nothing but another lost soul trapped in the blade of this man who desires only to increase his kill count.

The baby is pink-faced and as bright as the sun that hits the white marble of her home. Her eyes sparkle with delight when she sees that someone has finally answered her cry for attention. She giggles a ring that reminds her parents’ murderer of a baby like her, bright faced and wide-eyed but with skin the color of his cloak.

The shackles of the chain rattle.

Rat claws curve in the back of his mind. The snake has lost its grip on its prey. It binds tighter.

“Leave me be!” the man hisses, the flint of fire against his teeth. The fiend unwraps itself from his brain, shrinking back from the flame.

He reaches into the crib with a battle-worn hand and presses the infant to his chest. She giggles. The scimitar clatters to the floor.

\----

“Papa!”

He looks up, clasping his hand, snuffing the magic that once danced over his palm.

She vaults into his lap before his eyes can focus. She clambers and crawls, a cat with little regard for personal space, and he suddenly understands what it’s like to be a climbing frame.

She settles comfortably in his lap, like he’s an armchair or a particularly fluffy sofa. And then she tugs at his sleeves, _give me your hands_ , and he must comply because those are the unsaid rules of children.

“Do it again,” she orders, bouncing with each syllable.

His hand blossoms open, moonflower petals showering in celestial light. The anthers of the plant is his magic, twirling and sparkling pollen caught in a whirlwind. His daughter’s eyes light up the way they did when she first laid eyes on him.

“Will you ever teach me, Papa?”

He calls her pet names in his own southern dialect, words her parents used to jeer at but that she takes to affectionately. But he has never had a name to call her.

“Maybe someday, my heart.”

And he has long forgotten to answer to anything other than “Papa”.

She pouts like she always does when he refuses. This is not like the tugging of sleeves or the slapping of wrists when she wants henna done. This is not something he can abide by.

She tires of the ballet dancer at the tips of his fingers and bounds off his lap as quickly as she bounded on.

\----

Sometimes the rat tries to burrow back into his skull. Chips of alabaster bone scrape off, fragile osteon completely at the mercy of eager claws. He sits there, chained to his throne, forlornly waiting for the rat to break through.

And then her face lights up when she reads an interesting passage from her favorite book. She comes running with insects crawling in her grasp, explaining and identifying each creature and its physiology to him. She comes twirling in a dress she tried to sew herself, and then giggles when the elements and her own recklessness destroy it.

She is the only light that can keep the demon at bay.

\----

His spell is so strong, even nightmares cannot penetrate the walls of this castle.

He expects to find her thrashing in the middle of the night with prophecies and memories that do not belong to her.

Instead she breathes softly against his chest. She does not stir or quake next to him, but sleeps soundly with dreams of pastel swallowtails and lush cumulus clouds. Occasionally, when he fears she may quiver from night terrors, he weaves spidery silk of old leather tomes and freshly cut grass and lets it float into her dreamscape. And then he watches her smile slightly. Quelled, he drifts off with her.

\----

 “Papa, why can’t we leave the castle?”

Her hand reaches hesitantly towards the barrier at the edge of the castle garden.

Her father reaches down and presses his hand to her head, smoothing out the frizzes and curls tangled in light hair.

Thin fingers brush the wall of magic, sending a ripple pulsating in waves. She presses forward through taut sludge and finds that no matter how far she reaches, the rubber will not snap.

“It’s magic. But not a spell I know how to break.”

“Will we ever be able to get out?”

“I don’t know.” He gives her the honest answer, knowing that by the age of eight she could always find where he hid the sweets by the inflexion in his voice.

He does not tell her, however, that their prison shrinks with every consecutive year.

\----

He spends one night compulsively reading a text on advanced spell crafting. The arteries in his eyelids throb, begging for sleep, but he continues on until finally sleep barges in and takes hold of him against his will.

He awakens with a start and then blinks when he finds his daughter standing a respectful distance away from his desk, staring at him.

He blinks a few times, expecting a greeting of some sort, but she continues on staring. For a minute, he considers he might have muttered a metamorphosing incantation in his sleep, and now she is patiently considering what to do with this inconvenient beast taking up the space on her father’s desk.

To prove his identity, he says, “What are you doing up so late?”

“Where are my parents?”

“Dead,” he answers. A harsh reply for most children, but this ten year old in front of him is not exactly a child.

“How did they die?”

 _I killed them_.

\----

He invites her to the hall, formally, properly, as if he is now king of this domain and she is a messenger welcomed in with permission. She is tall, erect, sleeves of gossamer streaming down her elbows in magenta chiffon waterfalls. He thought a dress stitched with his own amateur hands would never look regal, but she is more than that and wise. And all this at only eleven.

How cruel.

“What is it, Papa?” Her speech is the way etiquette scrolls urge it to be, but “Papa” still rolls off a childish tongue.

He says nothing.

He spreads a scimitar flat over his palms.

He drops the blade, lets it fall till it almost hits the floor, but then he catches it.

Rust-red stains and indents from bone, it has never failed him.

His daughter lifts her chin. He is proud that she does not fear anything.

“Your parents are not dead. They are trapped in this sword. They, and the entire inhabitants of this castle.”

Her face does not twist or turn or even flicker, but coffee-brown irises darken at these words.

“You can take them all back, if you choose. But you must choose, me or them.”

“Why?” she shoots at him, like her words are an arrow tensed by a drawstring.

He pauses. “Because the only way to free them is to kill me.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He expected a protest or absolute silence, but he does not expect a monotonous denial of this truth.

Silence.

“If you want to alleviate your guilt,” she begins. “Feel free to do as you please. But don’t blame me for this.”

She is eleven but so much older than he is.

“If you’re going to leave me, the least you can do is name me.” Her voice is ice-cold fire burning. Her father never thought a sentence could leave him aching and hollow.

He raises his arm and points the blade to his chest. Before he can sink into steel and blood, the child darts forward and grips the hilt of the sword, pressing it to her chest.

“No,” she cries, pressing her hands into the blade. “You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to say that you don’t want to leave me.” Lines of red trickle down rusted metal, and he remembers the remnants of her mother.

He lets go, only so that he can peel her fingers off the scimitar. Doused in red, darker where the blood meets the creases of her palm, he is surprised that hands so small could carry so much strength.

He forgot that she was so much younger than him.

“My child,” he sighs and presses her chest to his. He can hold her entirely, her body shivering against him, and he is brought back to that night when he picked an infant out of its crib, crying and shaking in his hand for food.

He squeezes her closer when he remembers that he almost meant to kill her.

The scimitar clatters to the floor, metal shattering as if it were made of glass, spilling from one end of the hallway to the other.

It breaks, and so does everything in it.

\----

A spell so strong, broken so easily.

Ridiculous.

It takes time for their bodies to return into the physical realm. They appear to him first as outlines, silhouettes of ghosts wandering the castle in utter confusion. And then color fades into their dresses and their skin and he begins to recognize the waiter who cried out when stabbed or the maid that didn’t even see his saber coming.

Sometimes he regrets making them wander for eleven years, but then he remembers that their anxiety is nothing compared to his grief.  

After all, they are free now.

They will find that their barrier has shattered as well.

The residents of this castle begin to catch glimpses of him as time moves forward. Their eyes flash with anger, and he knows he must leave soon before they decide to severe his head from his body.

\----

“I want to come with you.” He glances down at his daughter, her fingers curled tightly in his sleeve.

\----

His home is far, as promised. He fears she will not find comfort in sand dunes and boiling temperatures as he does, that she will burn in the sun and cry for her gardens once she tires of the desert.

But she does not shy away from the heat of the sun, nor from the heat of the kiln where he teaches her to make flatbread. Her arms are still too short to reach to the bottom of the oven, so she masters rolling the dough instead.

At first, he doesn’t notice the layers of brown crawling over her skin with each passing day, not until the sun bleaches her hair so light, it is as white as the dough father and daughter flatten and bake.

He laughs when he finally realizes and brings a clay pot filled with henna.

“This is what we used to do when our hair turned white,” he explains, smoothing thick mud into silky hair. He washes off the paste, leaving behind a bright scarlet color.

“I look like you now,” she giggles, leaning on his shoulders and pressing her nose to his.

For all her cleverness, the child never realized that her father’s hair had been white at its roots, and this was why he always painted henna into it.

\----

After some time, she steps outside and notices a blur spreading larger over the horizon.

“Papa,” she calls, and her father steps out of the adobe they had chosen to live in.

His heart flutters, fearing that what lies on the horizon is a form of the dreaded consequences of his actions so many years ago, returning to claim what he had stolen.

Instead, he realizes it is his lost tribe.

\----

“We thought you were dead.”

He hears only her voice. It cuts through the arid silence of the desert, sharp and straight as an arrow, and he recognizes it immediately. He does not have to turn to see the thick red braids rolling over her shoulders, the wide stocky frame that compliments a dark face—a face that manages to turn from frighteningly monstrous to soft and gentle within a fraction of a second. She is second-in-command of his tribe.

And his wife.

“Koyal,” he sighs, shifting around. She holds out her arms, tears welling in her eyes. And they move towards each other, until Koyal is in his arms and it is the second time in a year that he has to steady a crying frame.

“Tell me I’m not dreaming,” she sobs.

“You’re not,” he manages before breaking down with her. He presses soaked lashes into her neck, drinking in the scent of flowers he cannot remember the name of. Her skin is hot and familiar, and it is the first time in twelve years that he sees his own skin reflected in someone else.

Finally, they quiet and pull apart, but his once wife refuses to break complete contact.

“Ganondorf.”

He forgot his own name, but remembered hers. He almost says this aloud, with emotion flooding over him, but then stops himself, knowing that she would only tease him for the rest of his life about it.

Instead he watches as she laces her fingers into his, rough and firm, and squeezes his hand.

It has been so long.

For a moment, Koyal is smiling at him, beaming, brimming, her husband back from the dead. And then she glances at their old home and sees a child exiting through the wooden frame and her smiles falls.

“Is that…” She tugs forward, fluid forming over her eyes again. “…Syah?”

The name catches in his chest. He can’t break her heart a second time.

“No,” she realizes, clapping her hand to her mouth. She shakes her head silently, unable to continue speaking and buries her head back into Ganondorf’s chest.

\----

She crawls into Koyal’s lap like a kitten inspecting and sniffing a new friend.

“Are you going to be my mom?” The way Koyal’s face softens at this question is enough for her husband to know how much her heart is melting.

She adjusts the child more comfortably on her hip and answers, “If you want me to.”

She seems to have already accepted her and presses closer to Koyal, beckoning her for a kiss on the cheek.

“But what is your name, my sweet?”

“I don’t have one.”

Koyal flashes her husband a look. He only frowns back at her.

“Let’s name her Syah,” she says after a moment.

“We are not naming her Syah.”

There are suddenly tears marring his vision of the child and he has to blink a few times before they evaporate away.

“Zelda,” he remembers. A memory rushes to him of her parents’ desperation to protect their newborn daughter, their precious heir to the throne, and he remembers what they called her.

But he refused that name, not wanting to soil an innocent child with the name murderers gave her. Hearing it ring in his throat now, though, it oddly suits her.

“You finally remembered!” He doesn’t expect this exclamation and sits numbly as Zelda embraces him.

\----

Zelda is not used to people. She shies away from the more eager members of his tribe. When they surround her and greet her and pull her in directions out of excitement, she escapes and hides behind a billowing cloak.

But slowly, she begins to accept that there are more than two people in this world.

Still, she spends most of her time latched to Ganondorf, preferring to observe Gerudo children from afar rather than join them.

Twilight is a fearful hour for Gerudo. The desert is not like the gardens of the castle, where living creatures roam and guard the earth they inhabit. The desert is a wide empty expanse, and only demons wander the horizon Zelda stares at.

The evening sun is warm on her calloused bare feet. The wind howls as it rushes past her ears, but her father keeps her warm.

Strange, that she has never felt more at home.

She wants to ask who Syah is, not because she doesn’t know but because she feels as though Ganon needs to answer.

“Seeing an infant with a slit throat is not something one can easily forget.”

His eyes are like amber stones, encasing an ancient relic frozen in time.

“I lost twelve years of being with my wife, for revenge. In my grief, I lost more than I needed to. A child, and then a wife.”

“But you got twelve years with me.” She looks up into her father’s eyes, cat-like and wide.

For a moment, he only stares back at her.

“Yes,” he finally agrees and brushes a finger against her cheek, eliciting a sweet smile from his child. “I did.”


End file.
